My Father's Shoes
For Moon. My great unknown.
One day I asked my mother, just a few days before she left. Give me back my father’s shoes and let me walk in them. What do you need them for? — she said.
I need them for when the rain falls on the field of bones and roses.
Take these boots, son — she said — they shine like the silver of “Judas.” Thank you, mother — I replied — this way I’ll be able to walk into the future through all these sad reflections of lost roads, untraveled roads, that I have yet to know.
Going to dialysis will never be the same again. I’ll no longer be able to go with the same sense of hope. You cannot be normal and alive at the same time; I’ll feel life passing quickly, like the mountains of a landscape.
No person concerned with their own equilibrium should push themselves beyond a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.
I have ended up a tired man. To want to be free is to want to be oneself — but I am already sick of being myself, of walking through uncertainty, of wandering across truths, returning from paradox and provocation in search of impersonality and routine. Ripe now for the commonplace, I renounce singularity. I have nothing left to tear down except myself: the last idol to be fought… My own illnesses draw me in.
Having arrived at the confines of analysis, terrified by the nothingness I find there, I retrace my steps and try to hold on to the first certainty that comes within reach — but I lack the naivety to cling to it fully. From this point on I am nothing more than a theorist, a hybrid thinker.
From now on, when you are no longer with us, in my most difficult moments I will close my eyes, I will listen to Handel’s Messiah, and I will see you as you truly are… A dream.
I like to feel and smell paper. I love you, Moon.
Carlos